Sunday, August 31, 2014

If you are dead, you cannot mount a comeback. If all life on Earth were destroyed by, say, a large comet impact, there would be no revival. Ruin is forever.

The destruction of all life on Earth is not 10 times worse than the destruction of one-tenth of all life on Earth. It is infinitely worse. A fall of 1 foot is not one-tenth as damaging to the human body as a fall of 10 feet, nor is it one-hundredth as damaging as a fall of 100 feet (which is very likely to be lethal). Walking down a stairway with one-foot-high steps, we are typically immune to any damage at all. Thus, we can say in both instances above that the harm rises dramatically (nonlinearly) as we move toward any 100 percent lethal limit.

The concepts in the paper are applicable to systemic problems such as climate change. But the paper addresses only two specific issues, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and nuclear power, to illustrate its main points.

The precautionary principle refers to a policy that demands proof that an innovation in not broadly harmful to humans or the environment before it is deployed. We are referring here to public policy issues, not decisions by individuals. The question the paper tries to answer is: When should this principle be invoked in public policy?

The answer the authors give is surprisingly simple: when the risk of ruin is systemic. That doesn't mean that they suggest no steps to mitigate risk when ruin might only be local, say, the explosion of a fireworks factory. But, they feel that such an event falls within the realm of risk management. An explosion at one fireworks factory cannot set off a chain reaction around the world. Individuals in and around the plant might be ruined. But all of humanity would not ruined.

In the two examples covered in the paper, GMOs and nuclear power, the authors come to the surprising conclusion that nuclear power on a small scale does not warrant invoking the precautionary principle. Small-scale nuclear power does warrant careful risk management and cost/benefit analysis. Whether the damaged reactors at Fukushima would fall into the category of small-scale nuclear power isn't clear. Their effects were worldwide, even if small in most places.

GMOs, however, offer a classic case of unforeseeable systemic ruin. We will know we are ruined by this untried technology after the ruin happens (perhaps in the form of famine or widespread human health and/or environmental effects). The authors categorically reject the notion that modern genetic engineering of plants is no more dangerous than traditional selective breeding.

This is because traditional methods are tried on a small scale and only achieve large scale acceptance and use over time if they are successful, that is, demonstrate no drastic side-effects or failures. This mimics nature's bottom-up approach to evolution; the changes affected this way are gradual, not drastic--and, of course, they don't involve transferring genetic material from completely different species, say, from a fish into a tomato.

Proponents will say that cross-species transfer of genetic material takes place in nature as well. But its scope is limited and its survivability and evolutionary fitness are tested over long periods during which these changes either thrive or disappear.

The top-down approach of the GMO industry introduces GMO crops everywhere across the world in a short period and combines one risk--untested genetic combinations--with another grave risk--monoculture. The long-term product of these two risks is unknown. But it is rightly categorized as systemic. GMO crops are now deployed worldwide and they can and do also contaminate non-GMO crops and wild plants through pollination.

Crops created through selective breeding have long histories of success and toxicities that are well understood and unlikely to change suddenly. As each new GMO crop is deployed, we cannot know ahead of time whether it will lead to systemic health and/or environment problems because there is little testing and, in any case, the amount of experience we have with GMO crops is far, far shorter than for the products of traditional selective breeding.

With each step we take in the production and deployment of new GMO seeds, we are playing a game of Russian roulette. The first few times we've pulled the trigger, we did not get catastrophic systemic effects--not yet, at least. But, since there is a nonzero risk of such effects, the probability of creating catastrophic outcomes becomes certain over time. The risk is virtually 100 percent that we will ultimately reach the chamber in the Russian roulette gene gun that causes catastrophic and widespread damage to humans and/or the environment.

Saying that there is no evidence so far that this will happen is a failure to understand that hidden systemic risk can often only show up on very long time scales. And, of course, when that risk does show up, it's too late to do anything. Remember: when we manipulate a gene or genes inside a plant, we are not doing just one thing. Without knowing it, we are affecting multiple systems in the plant and in the environment the plant lives in. We are creating multiple possible pathways to ruin.

This is just a short preview of the article cited above. The article is quite accessible to a lay reader and, in places, even entertaining. I encourage you to read the whole thing. It is the most rigorous statement to date concerning the precautionary principle and risk in that it outlines clear criteria for judging when that principle should be invoked and when it should not be.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

The human community spans not only space but time. Naturally, we include in our community those closest to us--family and friends--and then in concentric circles of affiliation our co-workers; our fellow churchgoers (if we do that kind of thing); members of a civic group, a book club or a sports team to which we belong; the inhabitants of our town or city, of course; and our country. Some people even count themselves as citizens of the world.

And, while we tend to reserve our deepest feelings for those closest to us, worldwide telecommunications makes it possible for nearly everyone around the globe to feel something for those very far away who lead very different lives. Recently, for example, our sympathies have been directed toward those suffering and dying from the Ebola virus.

But, the human community also spans time. We include not only those alive today, but those who've lived before us. They might be departed parents and grandparents. They might have disappeared generations ago and exist now only on a family tree and as an association with an heirloom. We might also remember a whole culture (say, ancient Greece or Rome) now gone and which we know only through its artifacts and writings. We look for guidance from the ancients, from founders of our respective countries and from those considered wisest in our history both through written accounts and now increasingly through audio and video captured while they were alive.

All of this makes perfect sense. What makes less sense is for us humans to include in our community those who are expected to come after us. I am not referring to our children or grandchildren. I mean those who will not even have been born yet when we die, those whom we will never know.

Humans have an exceptional talent for being able to imagine events which have not happened, to run scenarios in their minds and to plan based on those scenarios. The events we imagine are placed in a time zone we call the future. The future is full of potential, but little else. It does not actually exist except as a construct in our minds. And, yet every politician, every businessperson, every human almost without exception is terribly concerned about the future, or at least, says so.

Some say we humans deeply discount the future--which is just a way of claiming that we care less and less about the effect our actions have on the future, the more distant that future is. But I would say that we don't discount the future so much as we continuously reimagine it to suit our purposes (and to soothe our consciences, when necessary). We actually care deeply about the future as we imagine it!

The future of the country is at stake, the politician says. The future of the industry is at stake, says the businessperson. The future of humanity is at stake, says the activist and the moralist.

But what does this mean since the future is really a concept and not a reality? It seems natural for evolutionary reasons that humans are concerned about the survival of their genes. This is instinctual among all living organisms. But there is something more to our human concern about the future.

Humans are not interested merely in the survival of the species, but also with its so-called "advancement." Modern-day humans--unlike, say, ancient Greeks or Romans--typically imagine the future as a place in which humans become more powerful, more creative and more content. Human culture advances. The idea that it might stagnate or worse, decline, brings shreaks of horror from the champions of enlightenment and progress.

So, our concern about the future is in part a worry that it might not be better than today--better usually being defined as bigger (more stuff from the biosphere appropriated for human use); more luxurious with extra features and more fun; and above all, more automated--the world as one big push button.

We are concerned both with continuity and trajectory. And, this is where our thinking gets foggy. The continuity of the human race might require a different trajectory. The current argument over sustainability comes down to this. Those defending the status quo contend that the continuity of humans is assured by our continuous (imagined) upward trajectory. We've lived this long and succeeded against all challenges for 4 million years. And, with the technology at our disposal today, we should be secure for 4 million more. (Those making this argument, of course, are not thinking that our technology threatens our continuity.)

The apologists for our current trajectory by and large do not, as some suggest, care nothing at all about those who come after us. Typically, these apologists are not cynical; they do not secretly believe we face grave risks to the existence of humanity while publicly pretending those risks don't exist. Instead, they imagine a triumphant future that proceeds from a triumphant past.

Those decrying the status quo suggest that the really important trends, the key indices of the health of the biosphere that sustains us, are actually going down: the decline of soil fertility, the destruction of species, the deforestation of vast tracts of wilderness, the overfishing of the oceans, and perhaps most dangerous of all, the changing climate, a change sponsored chiefly by humans. In the end, the biosphere will still be here, but humans may be absent.

It seems our concern with the future comes down to what we imagine in our minds about how these views of the present play out.

The extreme pessimists may imagine all the fruits of civilization vanishing: art, literature, philosophy, science and the technology it spawns, the memory of thousands of years of struggle and inquiry lost in a few decades through a carelessness that leads to a kind of genocide of the greater part of the human race and the destruction of modern civilization.

That is a sad and frightening prospect, and it's easy to see why some people feel so deeply about this imagined future. Most, but not all, pessimists think we should try to prevent this kind of death and destruction or, at least, try to mitigate it.

The optimists dismiss such a dour outcome as more or less impossible and wonder what all the fretting is about given the great things we humans have accomplished so far. Since the future is imagined to offer both continuity AND more of what we call "progress," there's no need for alarm.

And so, to the four cardinal points on the compass, we add the axis of time, both backward and forward. Our human story and our identity would be incomplete without this axis. There is no glory in a culture that is about to vanish. Only the most misanthropic pessimist would take satisfaction in that.

Instead, most optimists and pessimists imagine themselves as part of a culture with a story that continues. What they disagree on is whether that continuity will happen with the current leadership in charge presiding over business-as-usual--or only with drastic changes to make a scaled-down version of our civilization possible before our violation of the limits of nature turns fatal.

Even though all we actually have is the current moment and our memories of the past, it seems that unless we can fill in that blank called "the future," a time that will always be a product of our imaginations, we cannot know who we are because we will not know where we are going. And these days, that seems to be the paramount question for the human community.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Thus happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose. --William Cowper

For years my father--who is a really great guy--has been telling me that I'd be a happier person if I didn't write about all the converging threats bearing down on the human race. Turns out he's right!

Recent evidence suggests that a state of good mental health is associated with biased processing of information that supports a positively skewed view of the future. Depression, on the other hand, is associated with unbiased processing of such information.

Let me translate: If you fool yourself about what you are really seeing in the world and convince yourself that it will lead to a good future for you and whomever else you care about, you'll maintain good mental health. If, on the other hand, you look reality squarely in the eye, you are more likely to get depressed. Life, as it turns out, isn't a bed of roses.

Now, I would put the "positively skewed" person in the same category as turkeys. You may be familiar with philosopher Bertrand Russell's story of the turkey. A farmer feeds this turkey every morning. Using inductive reasoning, the turkey becomes more and more convinced each day that the morning feedings will extend indefinitely. One day the farmer appears with an ax, demonstrating the weakness of inductive reasoning.

It's easy to see that the turkey is happier up to the point of slaughter NOT knowing what is coming. (I'm assuming the turkey, in this case, would be powerless even with foreknowledge to prevent his own demise.) Not knowing, he is better adjusted to his surroundings, and he's not busily writing columns about the impending turkey slaughter that all turkeys should be aware of. This lack of knowledge certainly prevents stress and stress-related diseases, both mental and physical. One has to admit that the turkey has a good life (for a turkey) up to a certain point.

We should also note that there is no way that examining his past--i.e., previous feedings--would allow the turkey to understand the danger. The slaughter of turkeys is nowhere to be found in the time series of his feedings or his life in general. (The analogy for the human race would be the last 150 years or so in which the notion of perpetual progress has become entrenched in the human psyche.)

We can learn two things from the turkey's story. First, if you are a turkey, it is better to be ignorant of your own demise if you are be unable to do anything about it (even with foreknowledge). Second, information about the nature and timing of your demise may not be available through an examination of your past--though an examination of the past of many turkeys might shed light on the situation.

Let's expand on this. Since I am, in fact, not a turkey, or more particularly the turkey in the story above, it is possible that I might be able to do something to avoid my premature demise if I have information about it. But, of course, anyone who writes about our converging environmental and resource-related threats, isn't really writing about individuals, but about humans as a species.

So, it is possible that one path to relative happiness is to remain ignorant of such challenges so as not to suffer anxiety about them. Then, if society cannot head off these catastrophes, at least you wouldn't suffer anxiety about them prior to their arrival at your doorstep. And, it's possible they may never reach your doorstep during your lifetime. This, however, sounds more like a dereliction of one's civic duty than a path to enlightenment.

That's because if my efforts and the efforts of millions of others around the globe are able to move the needle of society toward sustainability, those uninvolved and untroubled by our problems would be getting a free ride. We sustainability types do all the work and then have to share the benefits.

But, the more people who join in the work of moving society toward sustainability, the more likely it is that this work will succeed. The failure to achieve a sustainable society might be the direct result of too few participants trying to achieve it. The free ride problem just got a lot more deadly.

There is also the problem of the definition of "good mental health" or more speculatively, the meaning of "happiness," and whether these ought to be one's goals in life. Human life, no matter how materially advantaged, is bound to be filled with pain, disappointment and loss. The unpredictability of our lives makes it certain that you cannot plan to have a happy life. You may get what you believe to be a happy existence. But it is likely to be the result of luck more than choice and planning.

And, if the definition of happiness includes all kinds of unhappiness experienced in the pursuit of one's goals--even if those goals are achieved--I would say that such a definition is drained of all intelligibility. It may have some mystical significance that I don't understand. The everyday meaning of happiness, so far as I know, does not include excessive suffering, pain and loss.

But back to my father. He also contends that he is very good at dealing with "reality." And, he is. He's one of those rare people who, when he looks at what he has to do each day, realizes that the task which seems most disagreeable is probably the most important.

I take this as a clue that he has not pursued happiness as his main goal in life. Rather, he saw his highest calling as his duty to others, to his family, to his friends, to his community, to his country, to the people who worked for him while he was running several companies. There is a certain satisfaction in living this way, some might even say a certain joy in the commitment itself. But it is not a path that leads to a persistent state of happiness.

It really should be no surprise to him that "being happy" is not my highest priority, and that his wish for all his children to "be happy" could easily turn into a curse of ignorance. Admittedly, trying to understand the world around us can end up being burdensome, especially if one concentrates on the human prospect in the face of the emerging multiple threats to the stability of our civilization.

But trying to understand our place in the universe and on the Earth can also be exciting and stimulating. And, trying to move society in a more sustainable direction in concert with others can be both rewarding and fun. It turns out that even people who don't put their personal happiness first on their list of priorities can have a good time in this world. And, sometimes they can even be happy!

P.S. Doing something which gives our lives a broader meaning can give us a kind of satisfaction that the "pursuit of happiness" can never provide. I am reminded of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's story about a meeting with the religious leader of the Taos pueblo. The leader related the following:

"The Americans should stop meddling with our religion, for when it dies and we can no longer help the sun our Father cross the sky, the Americans and the whole world will learn something in ten years' time, for then the sun won't rise any more."*

The leader and his people were not just doing their ceremonies to the sun for themselves. They were doing them for the whole world.

*From The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Volume 9,I of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. p. 22.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

It has long been my contention that one of the chief symptoms of the age of constraints we have now entered would be the decline of public health systems globally. This comes at a time when our vulnerability to a worldwide epidemic is increasing because of widespread international travel, the proliferation of densely populated megacities and the general trend toward urban living. Of course, urban environments are ideal for spreading disease because of the proximity of the residents.

The science and practice of protecting and improving the health of a community, as by preventive medicine, health education, control of communicable diseases, application of sanitary measures, and monitoring of environmental hazards.

Public health measures are at the heart of increased longevity and health outcomes for most societies. It is disease that is prevented--AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; diseases associated with improper disposal of human wastes such as cholera and typhoid that are reduced and even eliminated through proper treatment of sewage; diseases for which there are now effective inoculations such as tuberculosis--that makes the most difference in our overall health. Accident prevention is also key: safer automobiles and workplaces are major reasons we are leading longer and healthier lives.

For all its benefits, public health has been shortchanged recently in many countries and localities because the sluggish world economy of the last several years has meant less revenue for the governments financing such expenditures. This slow economy is a puzzle only to those who do not understand that the economy runs on energy and energy, particularly oil, has been much more expensive than in the past. This makes the Greek economic blowup, for example, more of an energy crisis than a financial one. The Greek government and society were fine with all that debt until energy prices vaulted skyward and made it difficult both to service the debt and pay for the energy needed to run the country's homes, factories, commercial establishments and vehicles.

And, Greece wasn't the only country burdened by the double burden of debt and high energy costs. All of Europe has been hit by it to one degree or another. Much of Africa suffers from one or both burdens. And Africa also suffers from a higher degree of social and political chaos that results from weak central governments, governments less able for financial and administrative reasons to deliver adequate public health services to their populations.

This means that public health is consistently underfunded given its huge benefits and given the true threats. This is partly because the most obvious and dangerous threat--a fast-moving and deadly worldwide epidemic--tends to appear episodically at long intervals. The last truly major worldwide epidemic began in 1918 and ended in 1920. It was dubbed the Spanish Flu and killed an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the population. The equivalent death toll today would be 210 to 350 million people based on a world population of 7 billion.

The economic stagnation of Europe has made it difficult for countries such as Greece to maintain public health expenditures. The stress on health systems in the states of the former Soviet Union--the breakup of which still reverberates in many ways through the health systems there--has only been increased by the AIDs epidemic which is partly responsible for a population decline in Russia from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union to today. But perhaps the most vulnerable areas are many countries of sub-Saharan Africa where governments are weak, economic vitality is low (which limits government revenues) and health infrastructure is limited.

It's not just our poor prevention efforts, however, that are increasing our vulnerability. It turns out that our energy and resource policies are adding to our risk. Climate change, mining and deforestation appear to be playing a role in the latest Ebola outbreak. The very energy system that drives our economic engine using primarily fossil fuels leads to climate change which leads to increased stress on and fragmentation of forests where Ebola hides. Animals, particularly bats which can carry the virus, are seeking places to live among humans when habitat is lost. And, the need for human residents to make a living through exploitation of forest resources including mining drives people further into the African forest where they risk exposure to the virus.

The article linked above also stated that "many drug companies see no point in investing to develop better antimicrobial drugs because they will just be rendered ineffective in a few years because of overuse." Our carelessness is moving us back into a pre-antibiotic world.

If the current outbreak of Ebola is not contained, few people will understand it is because of the way our global system is structured and the vulnerabilities it creates: forcing people to seek livelihoods and food ever deeper in the remaining forests; logging those forests relentlessly; the burning of fossil fuels to power almost all our activities and the climate change it creates with its dangerous consequences for the spread of epidemic diseases; easy international travel which has already helped to spread the Ebola virus; densely populated, ever growing cities; and for bacterial diseases (not Ebola) pushing the use of existing antibiotic drugs because it is good for drug company profits (while ignoring the longer-term issue of antibiotic-resistant microbes).

Most people, however, will look at the Ebola outbreak as merely an external force of nature that we humans somehow had the misfortune to encounter. That kind of thinking will prevent us from learning the deeper causes of our public health vulnerabilities and therefore prevent us from addressing them as part of a larger project to create a healthier, more sustainable way of life.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, August 03, 2014

It is a testament to the psychological power of financial bubbles that people who know and trust me and generally accept the analysis I've put forth in my writings over the last decade are jumping into the stock market again with a pledge that they are in for the long term--no matter what.

Few would ever shop for a car, a house or even groceries the way people today are shopping for stocks--buying after the price has almost tripled. But a market experiencing a dramatic melt-up--26 percent for the S&P 500 last year and another 5 percent so far this year (8 percent when I first wrote this sentence)--has created a psychological contagion that is hard to resist. Who doesn't want to join in the mass euphoria experienced by others who are getting something for nothing?

Now there was a time when investing in the stock market for the long term worked because the businesses that made up that market were supported by unconstrained supplies of energy and other critical resources. The undulations in the economy were due primarily to economic cycles. But as economist James Hamilton has pointed out, 10 of the last 11 recessions were preceded by an oil price spike. That's not definitive proof that the oil price was THE cause of any particular recession. But it would be hard to rule out oil as a major factor in those recessions.

My view is that there is no more long-term in the stock market or any market. The relentless, if zigzag, rise in financial markets for the past 150 years has been sustained by cheap fossil fuels and a benign climate. We cannot count on either from here on out. In fact, oil has been at or near a record average daily price for more than three years. We are paying more for oil on average than we did in 2008, the year of the spike.

Another thing we cannot necessarily count on is the remarkable geopolitical stability that the world experienced for two long stretches during the fossil fuel age. The first one lasted from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914 (interrupted only by the brief Franco-Prussian War). The second lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until now.

Following the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq, the Middle East has experienced increasing chaos devolving into a civil war in Syria; the rapid success of forces calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which are busily reshaping the borders of those two countries; and now the renewed chaos in Libya. We must add to this the Russian-Ukranian conflict. It is no accident that all of these conflicts are related to oil and natural gas.

With oil and energy, in general, central to the growth of the economy, and economic growth central to the long-term prospects of the stock market, it's hard to see how the exceedingly sluggish worldwide economic growth of the last several years (which coincided with exceedingly sluggish growth in the rate of world oil production) could be the foundation for high stock market returns over this period. Something else must be at work.

I'm not the only one who has noticed that the world's central banks have engineered ultra-low interest rates, huge bond purchases (to lower rates) and gargantuan cash infusions into the banking system since the 2008 financial crash. This has led to round after round of speculative pressures in commodities including gold, in real estate (especially China), in junk bonds, and now in practically every market. The money had a hard time finding a home in a weak real economy which didn't need it (for example, in the form of business loans). And so, much of that money leaked into speculative finance.

To turn James Carville's famous phrase on its head: It's NOT the economy, stupid!

Under the circumstances I've described, anyone who is getting into the stock market now or who got in long after the current advance from the 2009 bottom is doing the equivalent of napping on the railroad tracks. Everything is fine until it isn't. And, then it's very, very bad.

What I'm describing is not really a so-called black swan event: a rare, unforeseeable, high-impact occurrence. It's more like a gray swan, obvious to more than a few before it happens. Given that those who perceive such gray swans are usually early, it seems almost inevitable that in the year to come, the S&P 500 will rise another 30 or 40 percent, and people I know who read this piece will be telling me just how wrong I was.

However, my emphasis is on staying out of harm's way. The terminal phase of a financial bubble can surprise everyone with its ferocious advance and its duration. But it ends without warning. And, the only way to actually profit from such a phenomenon is to sell before the crash. Keep in mind that the velocity of the decline also tends to catch people by surprise.

So, if you absolutely must invest your savings in the stock market, why not wait until there's a half-off sale as you might for any other item you are trying to buy? You will get twice as much stock and have far less downside risk.

_______________________________________________

Disclosure: I hold no stocks nor any securities which would benefit from movements up or down in the stock market or in specific stocks.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.